There’s a Crack in Everything: Acting the Part of a 30-Year-Old Virgin

CHAPTER 2

The first breakdown came after I’d spent twenty-plus years in therapy, from college until my early 40s, dealing with all the baggage my family and the church had given me.

I expressed anger and grief over my Dad’s actions, his many forms of physical abuse, and inactions, his absence from most of my day-to-day life. And in time I came to forgive him. Mixed in were the times where I stopped going to church altogether. That’s where I had learned shame.

I began to accept and love myself as I was. And in turn, began to see my own life as valuable as anyone else’s. I began to let go of fear and started taking risks. I was gentle and patient with myself. I was healing. I don’t know if all those years of suffocation and denial and self-loathing had changed my brain chemistry or if I was always destined for this, but I didn’t see the collapse coming.

I’d been a working actor since completing my Masters in ’92. Primarily theater for the first seven or eight years, then I moved out to LA in ’99 to try my luck at TV and Film. Some 50 or 60 national commercials — hawking everything from fried chicken to the latest cars to an anti-diarrheal medicine (now a fairly infamous hot tub scene) — and approaching 80 films and television shows, among them…